6._Finding Peace

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How the fuck did I get on the topic of orgies? Oh yeah, right, I was saying that that same feeling of temporal discombobulation happens when I try to recall the night I went to your hangout: all the memories are scrambled. They’re really, really clear memories, but they’re all shuffled, and I’m half-guessing at their exact order.

I remember putting on gloves and doing a final little wipe down of my steering wheel and dash. I remember waiting til the clock on the dash said 10 before I drove up to the big trash heap—I say that like you’d even know which trash heap I’m talking about, they’re everywhere. It was in the old loading bay about a block away. I remember thinking that my van looked so shitty that someone could just mistake it for scrap. I remember laying some of the pallets against it and putting a few big, flattened cardboard sheets over it, kinda cocooning it. I remember getting back in the van and putting everything on and checking it a dozen times, and I remember the very second that I stepped back out, my whole body suddenly felt cold and empty. Like my stomach was dropping away on a rollercoaster and then it kept dropping every time I took a step. But there was this distinct moment where it stopped. Like, a switch flipped and my anxiety totally vanished.

I was probably 200 feet away, and I suddenly saw myself walking from above and slightly to the left, almost like an out-of-body experience but not quite, it’s hard to explain. I saw myself walking up along the side of the building with the jacket wrapped over me and the hood over the NODs and I remember my brain saying—not thinking, it didn’t feel like I was thinking the thoughts, it felt like my brain was telling me—“those colors look really good” as I got closer.

Which is funny, because they probably didn’t look very good, at least they wouldn’t’ve in daylight. I’m not a fashionista or anything, but I don’t think brown and grey and blue go together very well.

I remember reading somewhere that wearing black at night isn’t actually as stealthy as wearing dark blues and dark browns. Black is usually too black, it actually pops from the background too much. Dark greens and blues and browns that aren’t black blend a lot better into low light conditions. But whatever, I just remember thinking—no, wait, not thinking, it was like a voice literally saying it—I heard a voice saying that I looked really good, and that’s right when all the anxiety and nervousness totally left my body.

I remember coming around the corner and walking in and I was kinda hunched with the hood low so no one could really see my mask right away, but I could still kinda look around. And your boy, the fuckin’ troglodyte—or troglodyte number 2, I don’t know—was sitting on the couch with some girl on his lap and he looked over and said “the fuck’re you?” and he looked across the room and I followed his gaze and saw your other boy in the corner who had already started walking over to me asking what the fuck I was doing and I stayed kinda hunched over til he was about 10 feet away and by then I think he saw I was wearing a mask and holding something under my coat because his face made this kind of confused look right before his jaw and nose disintegrated.

I think he had just started to say “oh shit” or something like that when I shot him in the face. Like, a half flinch—yeah, that’s a good way to describe it—he kinda half flinched as I was pulling the trigger. I think I put 3 or 4 in him and then I turned really quick back towards your fat homie on the couch who was trying to get up and fumbling with the gun in his pants all while this girl is still on him and he’s yelling “oh fuck oh fuck” as I ran up to him. I wanted the girl to get the fuck out of the way because I’m not anywhere close to an expert marksman and I was worried I’d hit her, but luckily, right as he had gotten the gun out of his pants he had thrown her off to stand up so I put a few rounds in his chest and he stumbled forward off the couch.

I backed up as he fell and put a few more in him as he went to the ground. He was still kinda crawling towards me on the ground so got up real close and put a bullet in the back of his head and when I did his body slumped forward and he let out this weird groan—like, kind of a gurgle and sigh combined.

You know in movies how when someone gets shot they, like, fly backwards and jerk around and blood sprays everywhere and shit like that? Or when someone gets shot in the head, their head explodes and their brains splatter everywhere and they go instantly limp and ragdoll over chairs and shit? Well it’s not like that at all in real life. When I shot those fuckers they didn’t spasm all over the place or anything like that. Honestly, it didn’t even look like they were really getting hit with anything. It wasn’t like they got pushed back. No blood geysers or guts spraying out. They just kinda slumped to the ground, but still moving a bit.

Even when I shot that fat cunt in the back of the head it didn’t, like, explode his face on the ground in front of him or anything like that. He didn’t go suddenly limp on the floor and drop his gun. He just kind of, I don’t know, stiffened up and quit moving around—but he was still moving a little bit, just really slowly, like his muscles were slowly relaxing. Not with any kind of purpose or intent.

The bullet thwacked into his dome and his body just kinda froze in the position it was in. But then very, very slowly relaxed into a sort of neutral posture. The gun kinda came out of his hand, but didn’t completely drop out. He just went from firmly holding it, to his hand loosely gripping it so that it fell halfway out his hand. It was like someone going limp in slow motion.

Then I put a second one right in the base of his skull and turned back to the skinnier one and put 2 more into his forehead, even though he wasn’t moving and his face was already fucked up. He had this bloody crater looking thing where his nose and teeth used to be. No open casket funerals for them I guess.

The junkies lying on the ground were watching but not really doing anything. The girl who’d been sitting on the dude was on the ground, like, pushing the dude or something. I don’t know if she was whispering in his ear trying to wake him up or what. I don’t think she really had any idea what was going on. But she wasn’t screaming or yelling or anything like that, so that was good. I had turned to the stairs and was meaning to slap the lights off before I went up because I figured the dark was better, but right as I got to the base of the steps, another one of your homies came around the corner. We basically came eye to eye and he blurted out “what the fuck” as we almost ran into each other. But the thing is, he came around the corner so fast that I didn’t know who he was at first, couldn’t tell if he was just a random nobody or what.

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I had tried to practice barrel jabs back in the desert—I don’t know what they’re actually called—where you just fucking jab your barrel into a person to knock them down so as to give yourself a chance to see who they are. I had tried practicing back in the desert in case I needed to figure out if someone was one of you motherfuckers or just a rando. But it’s not like I’d had live practice in the desert, I had just pretended to go around corners and jab people with my gun, so obviously I wasn’t very good at it.

I had tried to make sure no one I hadn’t seen before was at the place that night, I was pretty sure it was just you guys there, but I wasn’t a hundred percent.

Anyways, I tried to jab the barrel into your homie before I knew it was your homie, and I kinda hit him, but he was also already stepping backwards because he saw the gun—I mean, obviously he saw the gun, it was right in his fucking face—so he stumbled back and had his hands up by his face and I couldn’t get a good look so I told him to move his hands, but he just kept saying “no bro, no no no please, wait bro” so I stomped him in the nuts. That got him to drop his hands, and when I saw his face I immediately recognized the fucker.

I remember telling him to look at me and he did. He was all grimacing and confused looking, but he looked right at me, right into my eyes. And I know this is gonna sound like an exaggeration, like something I made up just to sound hard. But I swear I remember that he started to say “please” right as I shot him in the face. He got the word halfway out and then bang the fucker wasn’t my problem anymore.

Then I shot him twice more in the temple.

I think it was pretty much right at that point that I became acutely aware of the fact that the whole endeavor hadn’t been exactly “silent” even though it was pretty damn quiet—like I said, silencer plus subsonic ammo. It had only been, like, 30 seconds since I first walked in—no more than a minute—but I was worried that someone might’ve heard the commotion. Either someone upstairs, or possibly someone watching from outside, so I thought “hurry the fuck up, get this done” and I slapped the light switches at the base of stairs and started going up.

I was a few steps up when I remembered to change magazines. I didn’t know how many rounds I’d used on those 3—I guessed a little over half, and I didn’t feel like finding out I was empty in the middle of some later shootout, so I snapped in a fresh 30 rounder, and put the used mag in my pocket.

At first I didn’t think it was gonna be dark enough to need night vision, but near the top of the stairs it was actually almost pitch black, so I dropped the NODs and turned on the IR laser—that thing is so fucking cool—it’s invisible to the naked eye, but through the night vision it’s this green laser beam, it’s so fucking sick, feels like real life Call Of Duty.

There were a bunch of doors in the hallway and only some had light coming through and I wasn’t sure which one you would be in, if any, so I just started one at a time. The first two were just empty dark rooms and the third had some people laying around sleeping, all girls. I flipped one over ‘cause she looked like a man for a sec and she started to move around a bit, but I let go of her and she seemed to go back to sleep so I walked out. The fourth door had light coming out and I could hear voices inside, sounded like some dudes talking and maybe a girl laughing or something, which was frustrating.

It would have been so much less stressful if you didn’t have all those other people in that shithole with you. Anyways, I saw the door, and I thought for a sec maybe I could kill the lights in the room if I went in really fast or maybe reached around from the outside and flipped them off, but basically as soon as I’d had that thought I vetoed it, it was just too complicated—I didn’t even know where the light switches were or who was looking where in the room.

I flipped the NODs up and got right up by the door so I could touch the handle and I took a few deep breaths and then tried to turn the handle real quiet and open the door just enough to get the latch out. There was a moment where yall sounded like you were laughing really loud and that’s when I pushed opened the door a half inch or so. And then the laughing stopped so I froze thinking yall had heard or seen the door, but then yall were laughing and talking again so i stepped across to the hinge side of the door—which I should’ve done in the first place—and took another deep breath and then pushed the door open away from me.

Yall were still yappin’ about some shit as I stepped back against the hallway to scan the room easier. I remember yall finally quieted down—I assumed you were all looking towards the door—and you, or maybe your homie, said “you gonna come in, Chris, or what?” I assume Chris was the fucker I shot in the stairwell. Funny, I don’t actually know any of their names, just yours.

I saw a leg hanging off a couch as I backed against the hallway, it was obviously a girl’s leg. I remember in my body I had that rush of anxiety and fear and shit again all at once. It hit me like a dumptruck at that exact moment, and I froze up for a second, and then I heard you mutter something and the leg slid off the couch and into view and I saw hips and a stomach and bare tits moving towards the door. And then the fear was gone again and I shuffled up close to the edge of the door and as soon as that girl stepped into the hall I grabbed her by the hair and threw her on the ground and she started screaming “what the fuck what the fuck” as I turned into the room. That’s when I saw you—I saw your face and knew instantly it was you.

You were sitting at that big wooden desk with some chick sucking you off and your other fat friend sitting over on the couch with 2 other girls. I remember screaming “don’t you fucking move don’t you fucking move”—I’m sure you remember—and that chick I’d just thrown down had stumbled back in and she was screaming and hollerin’ and that fat piece of shit on the couch was fumbling with his belt trying to pull his pants up and I ran up to you and told you to get on the fucking floor and had the gun in your face and I kicked you out of the chair and you were this scared, pathetic, little fuck crawling on the ground and I kicked you in the side and then soccer kicked you in the face and you rolled onto your back like a fucking dog.

Then that screaming girl stopped screaming and ran out the door and the other girls had huddled over in the corner and that fat piece of shit on the couch was still fumbling with his belt just before the bits of his teeth and skull went through his fucking brain and out the back of his head onto the wall behind him.

And then there you were.

Curled in a ball on the ground screaming for your momma screaming “please please don’t shoot me” screaming like a little bitch. Blood and tears on your face and piss dribblin’ out your pants, just sitting there crying like anyone one this earth gave a fuck about you. And I remember yelling at you to shut up and fishing the cuffs out of my little pouch and telling you to put them on. I remember how you hesitated until I put two more rounds into the fat ass slumped on the couch with his brains and dick hanging out and told you to do everything I said unless you wanted to wind up with your brains and dick hanging out too.

And you started screaming “take the money take the money” that if I let you live you’d give me all the money, tell me where it all is, make me rich. I have to admit, I improvised right then. It wasn’t part of the plan, the plans was to get in and get out as fast as possible—no distractions, no hesitations—but you kept fucking blabbering so I finally bit and you said the key was in the desk.

Where’d you get that desk anyway? Just something on the side of a curb somewhere? You couldn’t just steal something that big from a store, could you? Had it just been left in that office?

I suppose it looks pretty fancy to you, makes you feel like a real fucking gangster, some fucking mafia don, huh?

You just had the key sitting in the top drawer—fucking idiot. That shitty little safe in the corner I probably could’ve broken open with my bare hands, or just dropped it out the 2nd story window, that’d’ve opened it. Or, fuck, I could’ve fucking carried the thing back to the van.

That would’ve slowed me down though, opening the piece-of-shit with a key was the quickest option. I remember getting another blip of adrenaline or dopamine or whatever when I reached in and felt those 2 fat envelopes—thanks for the 30 grand by the way—that was a very nice little bonus. In hindsight it wasn’t a good idea though. I mean, yeah, it only took a minute or two but those were minutes I didn’t have to burn. Really, I should’ve stuck to the plan.

Oh my god, the look on your face when I told you that you were coming with me.

Fucking priceless.

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6.

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